The Farmers Markets are back for the season. Here is a look at a few of the new vendors.

Gutter Punk Coffee

Whittier Farmers Market

Carley Kammerer’s parents owned a coffee shop in suburban Milwaukee. So growing up, a diluted mocha was her version of fancy chocolate milk, and she’s always wanted a shop of her own. But her business model is more than a coffeehouse.

Kammerer works as a social worker, and she’s seen homeless youth struggle to keep a job.

“They can get jobs really easily, but keeping them is really hard,” she said. “They can get fired really quickly.”

By offering jobs to homeless youth at Gutter Punk Coffee, Kammerer wants to teach basic job skills that can be challenging for youth on the street — calling in absences, resolving conflicts, keeping a schedule and emphasizing punctuality. An independent living skills curriculum would cover the basics of laundry, groceries and budgeting. And youth would connect to workers in their fields of interest, so they have bigger prospects after the coffee gig ends.

“This is a place where youth can work for a year in an environment that understands where they’re coming from,” Kammerer said.

She met business partner Ben Griswold when a friend invited him to one of the monthly community nights she hosts at her house. As a fellow coffee snob, Powderhorn neighbor, home roaster and financial analyst, Griswold became an ideal business partner. He was also interested in the business’s social justice angle, having launched a public awareness organization related to human trafficking in college.

“She was looking for someone to help carry the load and help make it happen,” he said.

They plan to rent time at local roasters like Corner Coffee or Bootstrap Coffee Roasters, using fair-trade organic beans from Cafe Imports.

“We’re excited to offer people the opportunity to not only taste amazing coffee, but put hard-earned money to a greater cause,” Griswold said.

Dulce Monterrubio (her name translates “sweet” in Spanish) is sharing her abuelita’s recipes.

“My dream was to really make Mexican pastries that also push the boundaries of cultural awareness,” she said.

She makes conchas, sweet breads topped with sugar designed to emulate seashells and filled with chocolate or vanilla or dulce de leche. She makes Frida Kahlo cake pops. She makes garibaldis, which are buttery pound cakes filled with guava jam and rolled in nonpareils, styled after the cakes she bought as a girl from the El Globo bakery in Mexico City. And she makes pineapple empanadas using her grandmother’s homemade dough recipe.

In Mexico City, Monterrubio worked with kids at the YMCA who had special needs or battled cancer. She immigrated to the U.S. in 2000 to study on scholarship at Augsburg College.

“Life happened. I stayed, met somebody, had kids, and continued working at Augsburg with students like me,” she said.

Her life took a turn during a student trip in 2012. She was physically assaulted and spent a month at home in recovery.

“It became my therapy, just to bake at home,” she said. “At some point I dreamed of opening my bakery.”

Monterrubio hopes that sharing Mexican cookies and pastries will help address the current political climate. She said that until now, she never felt afraid to speak Spanish in public.

“This is a way for me to build bridges,” she said. “We are different and it’s okay to be different. Get to know us through our pastries.”

After traveling and eating at vegan restaurants across the country, Heather Klein saw Minneapolis differently.

“When I came back, there really was nothing here at the time,” she said.

She reached out to vegan Facebook friends and discovered that Robbie Sims was looking to open a vegan restaurant.

“Robbie and I really wanted to give it a go,” she said.

They’ve been catering and throwing pop-up events over the past year, and they have five weddings booked for the summer.

For the farmers markets, they’re bringing vegan Drunken Noodles and Tofu Hash. The Love Ball Subs are made with lentils, walnut, hemp, flax, buckwheat and quinoa, slightly cooked and mashed together with spices, onions and garlic on a fried pita. They’re also bringing Walking Tacos — lentil and walnut taco “meat” served on corn chips with pico, cashew nacho cheese and cabbage.

Both co-founders live in North Minneapolis and they cook at Appetite For Change, a North Minneapolis nonprofit with an incubator kitchen for startups.

In the future they would like to open a brick-and-mortar restaurant and stock their products at grocery stores.

The byproduct of moto-i’s sake brewing process is providing the kasu base that’s fermenting vegetables new to market this year.

Jim Bovino, an Armatage resident and one of the early minds behind Gyst, is exploring Asian techniques and other fermentation methods at his new business Topos Ferments.

“Fermentation is a very old method of preservation,” he said.

By increasing the acidity of vegetables, he said, it creates a stable environment in which bad bacteria can’t exist. Microbes can sanitize food without a lot of fancy equipment, he said. And the methods don’t require additives, heat, canning, freezing, or other energy inputs.

And Bovino promises that the end results — like watermelon radish — will be delicious.